Let's Talk About Raye. Why Is He So Hated?

Let's talk about Raye. Why is he so hated?

I think it’s almost entirely because he comes off quite condescending to Naomi when she tries to bring up a good point to him during his surveillence of Light.

Naomi politely points out that it seems kind of suspicious that the bus Raye was on was hijacked while he was tailing a Kira suspect, and then he replies like so:

I think it’s mostly the way Raye phrases things, like that her shrewd intuition about the case is a “habit” she needs to get rid of, and that little “how about using that brain of yours for more WIFEY things?” comment at the end. Haha, it’s easy to feel like Naomi’s being patronized by him and told to get back to the kitchen where she belongs or something like that, and most people really love Naomi and were very upset that Light killed her so cruelly and so early on. The fandom gets really protective over her and this often leads to anger toward the male characters that didn’t interact with her very nicely (though usually not Beyond Birthday, mostly just Raye and Light).

However, I think Ohba genuinely meant for Raye to be a sympathetic character and for the audience to think of him in a pretty positive way. There is an issue all throughout the manga where the author’s sexism ends up colouring the way he writes all the female characters and their interactions with men, and I think this is just an example of one of those things. I don’t think Ohba necessarily realized that it sounded pretty patronizing, or if he did he probably assumed that most people would automatically agree with Raye in how he spoke to Naomi.

Some other interpretations that could be offered here are:

-Raye means well and is mostly worried about Naomi’s safety. He mentions that he doesn’t want her to do anything that will put her in danger, and reminds her of their original reasons for both coming to Japan. It is a very dangerous investigation, and he obviously is risking his life quite seriously by being one of the people tailing the suspects. It makes sense that he would be worried about her wanting to become more personally involved.

-He mentions that she’s not in the Bureau anymore, and that they’re there to meet her parents, and they plan to start a family. I think Naomi voluntarily left the FBI in order to become a homemaker, and though it’s easy to see this as more Ohba sexism in terms of “women should only be homemakers and that’s it,” I think Naomi probably left the FBI of her own accord and wanted this life for herself. Being a homemaker and a mother and a wife is a totally fine thing to want to be and it doesn’t automatically mean she’s just cowing to sexist ideas or anything like that, so we have to keep that in mind.

-I think Japan maybe has quite different ideas about this stuff in general in comparison to the Western world. It’s almost considered a relief for women to be able to get married and stay home and not work sometimes there instead, I do believe? I watched a little street interview about it once where Japanese women were being interviewed about if they’d rather work or be a homemaker. It seemed like a much more traditional mindset regarding this stuff, and like many thought it would be a luxury for them to not have to do the daily grind of a career at all. It’s also a very socially reserved culture there from what I’ve heard, and that could definitely lead to forming some odd ideas about the opposite sex. I definitely don’t know a whole lot about it myself, but it’s always good to keep in mind that we’re viewing things through the lens of our own culture most times, and our own interpretation isn’t always the objectively correct one.

-That being said, here is a post I made a while back in which Ohba demonstrates some clearly weird and offensive ideas about girls/women in comparison to men in his newer manga Bakuman, in which he almost seems to present them as a separate species entirely. The context of the scene is two high school boys discussing their female classmates, and the whole point of the scene is to show how smart the one boy is who is sharing his rather odd ideas about the girls: (X)

All in all I don’t think Raye is that bad, though I definitely also find it annoying how he words things to Naomi. I can’t remember how he came off in the LABB novel, because I think Naomi had a few phone calls from him in that too, but for the most part that above interaction is probably the one on which most of the fan hate for Raye is based.

Re: Light and Sayu’s Relationship

It’s a popular fandom view that Light is a person who doesn’t care about his family and would have absolutely murdered Sayu in the second arc if it wasn’t self incriminating to do so. Personally, I think there’s a lot of evidence in the manga that goes against that view and this is an analysis I wrote on the relationship between the two Yagami siblings that I am re-posting here. 

In my opinion, the most interesting conflict in Death Note is the silent one that takes place between Light and his own family members. The source of this largely internal conflict is obvious; Light is Kira, but the other Yagamis are sensible and they don’t acknowledge Kira as a legitimate enforcer of justice. As I said at the beginning of this post, the prevailing fanon opinion on Light is that he views his family as tools and merely plays to what’s expected of him as a son and an older brother.

But here’s the thing. what we actually see is Light repeatedly bending over backwards to try and protect his family and it is often to his own disadvantage rather than to his benefit. Why? Because he loves them. Plain and simple. It’s quite literally one of Light’s only redeeming traits and it’s a key part of what makes him a hopelessly tragic kid. In this post I’m specifically focusing on Light’s relationship to Sayu.

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Those!Nayomi is such a tragic/ interesting character to me. We obviously only see her through Light’s perspective, so when she has her own agency it really surprises me, like when she knew about L/Light before practically anyone. I was wondering if Mikami’s assessment that Nayomi is still in love with Light and only keeps Mikami and Kiyomi around to stay in Light’s orbit holds any truth? Also, Light seems to actually hold some genuine fondness for her, or is this too hopeful of me to think? 😅

Thank you so much, I love her and it’s one of the irritations of writing from Light’s POV that she doesn’t get the airtime she deserves in the way she deserves it. Because I haven’t talked much about Naomi, I’m going to talk too much about her here. I hope you don’t mind. xxxx

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What would the characters in Those! think of their canon Death Note counterparts? (And vice versa)

They’d probably think that canon!Light is a badly dressed brat and that canon!L is a homeless meth addict. :DDDDD

so what were l and mello fighting about in TWSFNFFA?

Do you mean when they weren’t talking for a while? Because oh God that was one of my favourite things I researched a lot at the time but didn’t use any of it because I knew it’d be a spin-off Mihael chapter. It started with Mihael criticising L for moving Stephen in so quickly, the way he’d handled things so there was an unresolved ex-appeal situation, and basically shat on everything L was doing and had done. L was very pissed off but pretended that he wasn’t and sent him on some trip to serve someone somewhere in China with very important legal documents. He didn’t get him flights because of ‘security concerns’ and made it all sound very undercover James Bond-like and that he only trusted Mihael to do it. L gave him the cheapest boat (because Mihael gets seasick) tickets there and train tickets across China, but Mihael eventually ended up in some tiny village on the border with Tibet with no more tickets to go any further or to get back. When he managed to get in touch with L, L said that Mihael must have lost some of the tickets because he definitely supplied him with enough for the whole trip (he didn’t). Mihael had to pay for his own fares to get to the address L had sent him to, only to find that the address didn’t exist, so then he realised that he’d been punked. He opened the envelope he was supposed to deliver and there was an open-ended plane ticket back to Tokyo inside with a note from L saying ‘for the idiot blond’ or something like that. 

koushikibleu just sent me this: